Most computers on the market today include one or more Universal Serial Bus (USB) connectors. These USB connectors allow a user to quickly and easily attach a wide variety of peripheral devices to a personal computer, such as a mouse, a printer, a digital camera, etc. The operating system of the computer is configured to support USB, so that the installation of the drivers for these various peripheral devices is quick and easy. Compared to other ways of connecting devices to a computer (including parallel ports, serial ports and special cards that are installed inside the computer's case), USB devices are relatively simple. The Universal Serial Bus provides a single, standardized, easy-to-use way to connect up to 127 different devices to a computer.
Unfortunately, as a practical matter, there is not space on a typical personal computer to include 127 USB ports, and the required hardware would greatly increase the cost of the computer. Consequently, computers typically include only a small number of USB ports. This condition becomes a drawback when a user desires to connect more USB devices to the host computer than there are physical USB ports on the computer. While USB technology initially became a popular connection type for PCs and related peripherals, USB technology has more recently migrated into consumer electronics (e.g. home theater systems) and mobile devices (e.g. mobile phones and PDA's). Consequently, the problem of how to connect USB devices to a host is increasing as the number, variety and popularity of USB devices grows.
One solution to this problem that is now coming into use is wireless USB (WUSB). Wireless USB allows multiple peripheral devices within a certain proximity to connect to a host via ultra wideband (UWB) radio signals, without the need for a physical wire interconnecting the host and the device. Under one WUSB specification, hosts and devices should be able to communicate at a rate of up to 480 Mbps at a range of 3 meters, and up to 110 Mbps at a range of 10 meters. This wireless connectivity not only eliminates the inconvenience of physical cables, but also opens up the host device to interconnection to a larger number of devices, without having to have many USB ports. Industry groups have come together to develop standards and specifications for WUSB, and devices enabled for WUSB are expected to be publicly available in 2006. One specification that has been developed and is expected to be widely followed is the Certified Wireless USB format from the USB Implementers Forum.